In order to be able to "Hot-Swap" drives safely, make sure your S-ATA ports support AHCI and that it is enabled. Some BIOSes allow you to disable/enable the Hot-Swap feature of AHCI as well, so ensure that its enabled if you want to use that capablity.

I haven't used that brand before but I've used hot swag cages a plenty. In all honestly once you go w/ one, it is hard to go back to a system w/o them. Especially the trayless versions like above.

Be careful w/ the drive locks on the one above. I've ones w/ a similar plastic lock, they ended up breaking if you used the lock a lot. I'd suggest leaving them in the unlocked position all the time. Otherwise the one you posted seems to be a good looking unit. I love the fact that it is entire black, most are not.

I use a 4 bay 2.5" HDD hot swap in a 5.25". Its clean and allows me to knock out the HDD cages they put in the front of cases that kill air flow. I have a home server so I don't need my case to fit 8-12 HDDs.

I've tried using them in a no-server hardware environment (Windows home server on an Asus 775 board). They work well except for the hot plug feature which usually causes a BSOD. I just power off and removed the drive which is super easy and works very well.

So I got a backplane for my hard drives and the motherboard doesn't really have enough SATA III connections on it. Is there some kind of PCI board that will work that will allow you to have SATA III through it? Is it just as effective? Looking at the motherboard there are 2 SATA III connections and 4 sata II connections.

Secondary question is if you have 2 optical drives I guess it would be more important to have the hard drives hooked to SATA III than the optical drives. So optical drives to SATA II? Sheesh. so many questions for what seemed like a simple task.

maybe in order of priority SSD / HDD / Optical drives to parcel out the connectors?